Cribbage is a card game which is played with a standard deck of 52 playing cards and a scoring device known as a "cribbage board". The object of the game is to score points, with the first player or team of two players to reach 121 points, being declared the winner.
The points are scored in several ways throughout the game. For example, by the playing of cards alternately with the opponent, the scoring of "go" points during play, the counting of a player's hand after playing and the counting of an extra hand which the dealer has, known as the "crib". There are 2,598,960 different hand combinations and, oddly enough, the scores of 19, 25, 26 and 27 cannot be made.
Traditionally, the scoring of the game is kept on the cribbage board. This board is made of wood or plastic and usually has two tracks of 122 holes, two of these holes being the start position and a 121st hole as the win position. Each player has two "pegs", as they are called, to be moved along the track, with the back peg advancing over the front peg to add to the score. The front peg then represents the "present" score and the back peg represents the "previous" score, so that, at a glance of the board, all players know where they are in comparison to their opponents.
As scoring is continual in cribbage, this means of scoring has many disadvantages. Pegs can be lost (therefore players make their own pegs by using match sticks, nails or any other similar object which is not as effective), broken off in the board (rendering that hole unusable), or knocked off the board accidentally (leaving doubt as to the correct score). Scores can also be made in error due to the manual count of holes and when play is finished and scores are to be added, both players tend to reach for the pegs at the same time causing frustration. Also, due to the fact that the holes on a cribbage board are small and close together, it is difficult for elderly players, handicapped players or players with vision problems to score.
In an effort to eliminate these problems, some electronically operated scoreboards have been proposed, such as those disclosed by U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,189,888, 4,193,600 and 4,245,216. These all have electronic means replacing the traditional pegs but either depart largely from the traditional appearance and scoring display of cribbage, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,600, or have the disadvantage that only one score indicating light per player is illuminated at a time, thus there is no indication of a "previous" score, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,189,888, or that the score input keys restrict the player to inputting his score in multiples of one or five, such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,245,216, or in the form of single digits, such as in U.S. Pat. No. 4,193,600.